What is Newgrounds?
Newgrounds [newgrounds.com] is a video-sharing, game-sharing, art-sharing, and music-sharing online community website. Its name may be abbreviated NG.
Newgrounds used to be a portal for flash games and animation. Flash was a technology that was used to create interactive websites. For that, you needed to have a flash player plugin installed in your browser. It could also be used to create games and animated cartoons that played in your browser, and it was extremely efficient at doing compared to everything we have nowadays (e.g. WebMs) because flash was a vector-graphics-based format with its own scripting language, which means an animation or a game could be a single .swf
file that was only a few kilobytes in size. Web browsers stopped supporting flash due to its many security problems, and some people swore HTML5 was a replacement (it's not, it wasn't then, and it's still not now), and just like that we lost great part of user-contributed creativity on the web. Even today, there is nothing that compares to the ease of creation that flash allowed random Internet users back in the day.
Today, Newgrounds distributes its own Flash player so that its older games can be playable [https://www.newgrounds.com/flash/player].
Newgrounds created its own music gallery where users can upload music, including Creative Commons-licensed music, so that users who created games had music in their games. It also has an online radio feature.
Newgrounds also has an art section where users can upload images, illustrations.
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